As he laid in the dark, trying to push away the words and images that kept swinging back and forth in his mind, bringing new ideas and theories and plans for the future, Sherlock Holmes found himself unable to sleep. It wasn't quite a surprise, for sure. He knew very well his own sleeping habits, and how little sleep he needed to keep going on for days. But after a week without having one single hour of sleep, Sherlock knew he was abusing of his body. Sooner or later his mind would falter, and at this point, a mistake was the last thing he could make.

No, he needed to sleep. He only wished his mind would shut down.

Rare were those moments, when he would willingly go to bed and try to mentally shut up.

The night was cool, and the half-light that came from the streetlamps was enough to make him unsettled. Those half-closed curtains annoyed him from day one, but there was nothing he could do about them.

Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep… Come on! He knew the more he prayed, the more awake he would feel. The best way to drift off into slumber was to think about something dull. And Sherlock Holmes had an infinite number of dull things to think about. Traffic hour. Politics. Newspapers. Animals. Mrs. Hudson. Scotland Yard. Innumerable cases that were brought to him by even duller people. Kitty Riley.

Kitty Riley. Besides of annoyingly dull, she had proven to be annoyingly annoying.

Sherlock sighed. Seemed as a good subject as any to make him drift off into sleep. He turned in his sorry excuse for a bed and stretched his legs and arms. He could already feel sleep coming.

When she said she was smart and all that crap about how trustworthy she was, how much he would need her later on, well, he could only feel repulsed by her absolutely lack of something that Sherlock Holmes called authenticity. John had already told him about how odd his definitions of the world were, so Sherlock had assumed that "authenticity" was one of those strange definitions, but it was the only one that could describe exactly what Kitty Riley was lacking.

And as in authenticity, Sherlock meant a lot more than just the plain surface of the word. She lacked personality, and he wasn't even going to mention the complete absence of sense of morality in her. She would sell her mother for a good story on the papers.

In a far-fetched analogy, Sherlock could compare her with a dull case. She was the human equivalent of a dull case – obvious, plain, simple-minded, driven by the most basic instincts. And, on top of everything that made her dull, it was fact that most annoyed him: she honestly thought she was an intriguing case! Those were the worst type of people and cases. The ones that had such a high opinion about themselves, even though they were the most boring types of beings.

Sherlock smiled.

He knew John would say that he could be categorized on this type, but truth was, he didn't think of himself as a wondrous person. He knew he was. And he also knew that everyone else thought the same about him, especially the ones that were most annoyed by his brilliance.

Kitty Riley was terribly dull. Her lack of authenticity was pitiful, if not annoying. Nothing about her had surprised Sherlock.

After all, rare were the moments when Sherlock Holmes was taken aback. In fact, he could count in his hands the amounts of times he had been truly surprised by someone… Which reminded him of someone else entirely. Someone that only recently had left him dead in his tracks and – Sherlock couldn't believe himself – speechless.

Well, maybe not speechless per se. Maybe unresponsive. A little taken aback. Just a little… Off his tracks.

Oh crap, who was he fooling? He was completely and utterly shocked when it happened. So out of the blue, in the middle of a conversation that otherwise would have turned out completely predictable and boring.

But then it hit him. She hit him, and he felt dizzy with the blow.

Molly Hooper was indeed one of the greatest surprises in Sherlock Holmes' life. He couldn't honestly expect that she would catch so easily his moods, his hiding places. She had read him like an open book. He was taken aback by that fact.

Sherlock had never expected anything from her – and that is exactly why he had never bothered to pay her much attention. She was as important as a table – when needed, it was there, no use to keep staring at it. But then it happened: the table grew legs and arms and a mouth, and he discovered that in return, it was observing quietly and intensely Sherlock Holmes.

In the end, Molly Hooper knew more about Sherlock than John did. Somehow, she had seen the sadness.

Surprise, surprise, Sherlock Holmes: it's alive! The table, after all, wasn't so much a table – it was more like a good case disguised as a table. And as much as he would look at her after discovering that Molly actually had some authenticity, he couldn't quite put his finger on it. She still looked plain, dull, predictable. However, now he could see something else entirely. She was a natural observer.

Or maybe not, maybe he was just over-rationalising it.

Maybe that strange little thing called love wasn't so useless. Sherlock began to think that maybe, and just maybe it was the sole reason for Molly Hooper's observational skills. She was obsessed with him, he knew that much, and it could be the reason for her sharp eyes on him, sharp enough to cut through his impeccable surface.

"Molly Hooper, then" murmured Sherlock for himself, surprisingly relaxed. He could feel the work of tiredness on his limbs: everything seemed so numb now… "Then Molly Hooper it is", finished him, before finally drifting off to sleep on Molly's couch.

END

A/N: 'Cos I ship 'em. Haters to the left. Can't wait for next season! I have big hopes for Molly, which deep down, I know are going to be unfulfilled. I'm not a native English speaker, so forgive any grammar mistakes. I'm a bit rusty.

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